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Soft Valkyrie (First Day from The Ring of the Nibelung) - Director's Cut

by Richard Wagner, arranged by David Kanaga

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about

Narrated by master storyteller Stephen Fry and performed by a full cast of singers working in varied styles– pop, metal, crooner, full operatic– Soft Valkyrie presents Wagner’s famous opera Die Walküre in a new digital de-rangement. The instrumental approach evokes the pioneering classical synth work of Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita, and with the addition of voices it becomes a kind of invisible cinema or future prog, quadruple album and enchanted audiobook.

"Now that I have created the invisible orchestra, next I should like to invent the invisible theater." (Richard Wagner, 1881)

Imagine that in 1876 Wagner produced The Ring of the Nibelung as intended. All the festival tickets are free for those without means. A makeshift wooden stage is built on the banks of the Rhine, its front even dipping into the waters where the first scene of Rheingold is played by swimming singers. Some audience members bathe, while barges drift by on their way to the Atlantic. Finally, the stage is burned at the end of the Third Day, according to Wagner's wish. The fire begins at the end of Gotterdammerüng, with the flames consuming Valhalla's facade; at first they are carefully tended, and then allowed to burn freely, the crackle and roar of flames having overtaken volume the orchestra by this point. The audience is escorted to safety. The musicians, too, leave with their instruments, but the sole copy of the orchestral score is left behind and also burned, along with all the instrumental parts (according to Wagner's wish), and the entire stage. Only the vocal score survives the spectacle, and is then freely distributed. Many begin playing the piece at home with family and friends, using only piano as accompaniment, or re-orchestrating using whatever instruments are on hand, soloists choosing selected notes from the polyphonic stack, ignoring others. For those wishing to stage new productions, new orchestrations proliferate, some attempting to reconstruct their memory of the premiere, but most arrangers having not been present for the original, they work according to their own intuition and indiosyncratic preferences.

150 years later, in 2026, there is no original Ring, only an uncountable number of derivatives..

Soft Valkyrie entered into production in 2020, exactly 150 years after the 1870 Munich premiere (at King Ludwig's insistence, to Wagner's irritation), and may be considered in the context of this fantasy history. The stage is no longer--it is invisible, or rather it has been vaporized but is now condensed and reconstructing itself in the mind's eye as a stream of aural images. Pressing play, we hear the cry of a falcon, see it soaring overhead, we hear the growls of Hunding's hounds, see them running, the whinny of a horse see it gallop, the roar of thunder sparkling lights rip through clouds, arpeggiating finger bells spinning blizzards of fairy dust, see it sparkle, and then a synthesizer—a strobing light, hot colors, sweat, fury of the hakken dance, witching hour in Rotterdam by the Port, friends and fun—the Dutch bargoen "gabber" for "friend" comes from the Yiddish for "associate, gather"— "chaver" from the Hebrew חבר.

After the vorspiel, the narration begins-- the stream of the aural images now clings to Wagner's stage instructions, the combination of word and tone crystallizing into a virtual stage of objects and qualities. Master storyteller Stephen Fry enters even before Siegmund, framing what follows as a species of enchanted audiobook.

The varied singing styles which follow offer a breadth of characterization entirely new to Wagnerian worldbuilding, one which would have been impossible at the 1876 premiere. Mark Twain described his impression of the Wagnerian singing style during his 1891 visit to Bayreuth: "apparently [the singers] are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out and let the public know it." And: "it was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, of course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts." Soft Valkyrie has not gone so far as to remove the voices (though a karaoke version is forthcoming that will do exactly this), but has rather brought them into a more intimate relation with the listener, and a certain adjacency to popular styles.

And so we hear the shimmering tones of Bryan the Mensah, occasionally ornamented with the golden sheen of autotune, meeting the gospel-inflected seduction of Hailey Clark, and the Orcic growls of Attila Csihar. When we zoom out from this domestic scene to the open air of the mountains we are brought closer in touch to the origins of the operatic style in vast open spaces--but here too Mattijs van de Woerd's Wotan is allowed an interiority that spans the spectrum from a piannissimo croon to the the classic full-throttled rage, and Claron McFadden meets his croon with crystal clear droplets of tone on the one hand, in her sympathy with Siegmund and Sieglinde, while on the other hand her voice soars in the Bayreuthian register along with her sisters the Valkyries, performed with sublime intensity by Mercedes Arcuri (Gerhilde, Helmwige), Clara Nadesdin (Ortlinde, Siegrune), Weronika Rabek (Waltraute, Grimgerde) Monika Walerowicz (Rossweisse, Schwertleite). Finally, from Bayreuth itself, Nadine Secunde gives Fricka a humanity that anticipates the sprechgesang of Lotte Lenya and post-Wagnerian Viennese melodrama of Pierrot Lunaire etc.

Of the language--when Wagner was contacted in 1877 about a production of Lohengrin in Australia, he replied "I hope you will see to it that my works are performed in English; only in this way can they be intimately understood by an English-speaking audience. We are hoping that they will be so performed in London." A related seed of this idea is contained in fourth of his revolutionary essays, and the one least discussed--"Art and Climate". If there are hints here of his own German "blood & soil" nativism that prefigure the evils of Nazis (and there certainly are), there are at the same time hints of another side of Wagner, anti-totalitarian, that would see each new production as requiring above all else, awareness and sensitivity to its geographic situation.

The materials have been arranged in Berkeley, California, near the bay where the Sacramento River empties into the Pacific. In 1848, gold was discovered in a tributary of this river, and in the same year Wagner wrote his first study that would lead to the Ring, forged from the Rheingold stolen with a rapacity that is well in accord in with the California Gold Rush.

Neither Rhine nor American. Outer Space.

The opera's setting moves from the stormy forest, to the interior of Hunding's Hut and to the spring night, then the open air of the mountains following the trajectory of our airborne Valkyries, up into the stratosphere. The geographic specificity of home is dissolved away into the sky, and these mountain peaks where the air gets thin and nearer to space hint at the actual location of this production--Outer Space, produced entirely over the internet, by video calls and emails. It's all too easily forgotten that these lightspeed interactions are connecting us to one another through thousands of satellites, little moons orbiting the Earth, that the internet is not metaphysical, non-geographic, but that its geography is still essentially tethered to the planet, only floating 400 miles above the ground (compare this to the 200,000 miles distance to the moon!).

Frontier music, with all of its wickedness and open air.

credits

released June 16, 2022

Presented by .................................................. Holland Festival
...................................................................Staatsoper Hanover
........................................................ and Dutch National Opera

Narrated by .......................................................... Stephen Fry

.......................................STARRING.........................................
............................. (in order of appearance) .............................

Siegmund ................................................... Bryan the Mensah
Sieglinde .............................................................. Hailey Clark
Hunding ................................................................ Attila Csihar
Wotan ..................................................... Mattijs van de Woerd
Claron McFadden as Brünnhilde
Nadine Secunde as Fricka
Valkyries:
Mercedes Arcuri as Gerhilde, Helmwige)
Clara Nadesdin (Ortlinde, Siegrune)
Weronika Rabek (Waltraute, Grimgerde)
Monika Walerowicz (Rossweisse, Schwertleite)



Act I MIDI: Marc Evanstein
Act II + III MIDI: Ernst Munneke

Additional flute: Jonas Pologe

Samples from:
freesound.org
SOPHIE Samples @ Splice
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

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David Kanaga Oakland, California

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